


The Bird and the Quiet Pursuit

by jazzfic



Category: Firefly
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-13
Updated: 2012-02-13
Packaged: 2017-10-31 02:17:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/338786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jazzfic/pseuds/jazzfic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Inara has always trusted her own intuition; getting others to do the same isn't so easy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Bird and the Quiet Pursuit

**Author's Note:**

> Written in 2007. First posted to Livejournal. For fwf ♥

He had spent the whole day following his sister around the markets of Kendra, the main port of St. Albans. We were there in the brief window of summer, when for a few weeks there is a thin wash of sunlight, a clear, pale sky over this icy world, and no snow. 

"You know, Inara," he said that evening, after the others had gone to bed and we were alone in the galley, "it's amazing what a little warmth can do to people." And he looked at me, his physician's gaze direct, but strangely detached, as if even now he was still hesitant to approach something so close to feeling. 

"That's very true," I replied carefully. "Especially in a place like this. So, what's the plan for tomorrow? I noticed that River had you on a tightly run itinerary today."

"I'm sorry," Simon said. "She's so eager sometimes..."

"I'm glad of it. She's improving by the day."

He shook his head. "You might doubt that, if you knew what she spent most of this particular day telling me."

"Telling you what?"

"That I'm thinking too much." The brief smile that had sprung to his lips quickly fell away. Simon stood and circled the table until he was behind me, and I could feel his fingers brush across my neck, and there was nothing hesitant about this. "About you."

My hand found its way to his. He was cold all over. When I stood up and let his lips touch mine, I couldn't help thinking that he tasted of guilt.

~~

In the beginning he took to buying me things; small gifts, in secret. An ivory fan, the bone worked to an extraordinary fine pattern--this was the first. He'd said, with a blush, that he had thought of me upon seeing it. And that it was probably stolen, but I shouldn't worry as most things in this part of the world weren't exactly legal. I must have smiled, knowing that the blush was, in part, my own making. I'd teased him: _Simon, you're a terrible liar_. I don't remember what I'd said after that, but when he'd come to my room later that night I had kissed him--the first we'd shared that was genuinely ours.

I wouldn't say that he didn't have flashes of awkwardness, uncertainties in the dark where hands fumbled for buttons and clasps, and instead of murmurings in my ear all I got were hastened apologies. I think I hurt his feelings on more than one occasion, not by bursting into laughter in inappropriate moments--that was a thing which had been trained out of me from a more innocent age, even though this was no job, and Simon Tam was no client--but simply by threatening to smile, gentle sympathies to console the blunders of new love. But although he seemed inclined to be treated this way, he rarely laughed back. He would wait until we were both calm, and then continue in silence, his lips warm on my skin, precise and neat. His patience was honourable. I suspected, but never asked, that he'd had more to put up with in life than something as imperceptible as a woman teasing him. 

Those were the days when we were still keeping secrets, and I don't think I gave him enough credit for his patience, for what he didn't say when he had the chance to. It was a safeguard. It allowed us the belief that here, in a place where crime was the axis that kept us moving, and where we were finally strangers to the lives we'd once had, we could almost be happy.

~~

The next day River was commandeered into Kaylee and Mal's company. Simon and I found ourselves walking the streets and paying almost no attention to the trinkets and strange oddments on sale. Except for one stall, where a woman, upon catching our eye held out a bolt of satin from a roll, bright red with an ornate design in black: a bowerbird, proud beneath its grand arch, head embroidered in profile and a single white stone in its beak. It was cheaply made, the pattern uneven and the quality of the satin poor, but Simon kept looking back as we moved on, watching with an oddly fragmented interest as the woman folded it away for the next hapless browser.

"Why didn't you buy it?" 

Simon smiled faintly. He stuck a hand under my elbow, and I saw then that he wasn't smiling at _me_ , but at the shawl I had wrapped over my shoulders, the ends of which were now caught between his fingers. "Do you need another?" he asked.

"Another shawl? Probably not. Did I _need_ another fan? No, but I recall you giving me one anyway. What it is isn't the point. I could have a hundred shawls already and it wouldn't matter."

His eyes settled on mine. A corner of his mouth tweaked, amusement breaking from beneath the otherwise solemn expression. "I suppose not."

"But, if it matters to you...well, that's something else."

"You think?"

"I do," I said, and here the smile finally spread. He dropped his hand and turned back to the stall. I stood back and waited as he bargained quietly, a monetary arrangement which I had no doubt was favoured towards the woman behind the transaction. Old habits die hard; even short of funds, as we so often were these days, Simon had never learned to completely shake off the part of his upbringing which told him that money was no real issue. And it was certainly not one to persuade him into hard bargaining over several feet of cheap, but overpriced, satin.

He walked back to where I stood, the purchase wrapped in tissue and tucked neatly under his arm. "She drove a hard bargain," he said, "but I managed to spin a wily deal."

"Simon, I was watching the whole time. You spoke to her for possibly twenty-five seconds at the most, _and_ you paid the full amount. That's hardly _wily_."

He shrugged, noncommittal. But he was in a good mood, and later, as we walked away from the crowds, he offered the package to me with a bow of his head and a kiss to my hand. He tried so hard. It was easy to love him, I think, for his faults alone.

~~

She sat on the edge of my bed, her large eyes on the square of satin. Her fingers made their way slowly across the arch, then to the white stitching in the sharp edge of the bird's beak. "He finds treasures for his bower," River said. "He is king of the forest floor, but alone. It is too dark to see..."

"Sweetheart, would you like to make something out of it?"

But she wasn't listening. "He bought it for you," she murmured. She turned and looked up at me. "He's not as regal as the bird, my brother, but he wants to impress all the same."

"Come now," I said, sitting down beside her. I picked up the satin from the bedspread and placed it into her lap. "Where does the bowerbird belong? In a shawl? A pillowslip perhaps? We could put it up on your wall--it would make a perfectly charming hanging." I smoothed a hand over her hair and she glanced at me with a half-smile.

"He belongs to them all," River said sadly. She tilted her head and gave a small shrug. "But that would be unfair. He cannot be everything. He has found his own place at last, and...he is happy."

She held out the material and I took it, watching as she slipped off the bed. When she reached the door River paused and looked back. "He bought it because you asked him to, Inara. You have to tell him he doesn't need to any more."

~~

An old contact from Jaing Yin had waved Mal. The offer was lucrative, so lucrative, in fact, that it was worth flying into Alliance territory. The following day we left, and my project--what exactly to do with Simon's gift--had to be temporarily put on hold while we prepared, as a group, to see this job through.

It turned out that there were other distractions to be had. Our chief reason for stopping on St. Albans in the first place had been to pacify certain low-smouldering tempers--borne, more or less, from five months of continuous work, with the payment being, as Jayne neatly phrased it, "a sore, sorry pittance, with barely an hour'n b'tween to take a damn swill". In other words, much needed rest. But the lure of profit, high-risk or not, was too tempting, and for Mal to have said anything but yes, I am certain would have resulted in just as many mutterings as having to leave the diversion--however fleeting--of a genuine, recreational summer.

Simon was worried about the low stores in his infirmary, and voiced this to the captain. To which Mal repeated the query that if we were so short on bandages and whatnot, what was the point of our stop on St. Albans? He had to be reminded--gently by Kaylee but a little tersely by Simon--that the icy world we'd just left wasn't quite the hot-bedded hub for black-market medical supplies, as Mal seemed to believe it was. 

"Why do I get the feeling that it's the same old arguments, just going round and round," Simon said to me later. He was pulling at the buttons on his waistcoat as he spoke, cursing in Chinese when they refused to comply. "He knows we need-- _I_ need--more supplies. There's only so many bullets I can pull out of his extremities before my anaesthetics run dry, and believe me, Inara, you haven't seen a grown man cry like I have when all he's got to bite down on is the barrel of his _yúchûn_ gun..." 

A button went flying. He growled in frustration and I placed a hand on his arm. "Simon, it'll be okay. It's always been this way, you know that. Do your job, and let Mal do _his_. That's all any of us can do."

I bent down and retrieved the button from the floor. I could feel his eyes on me. "And what, may I ask, is yours?"

"Small frivolities," I said calmly, holding the button to the loose knot of broken thread on his waistcoat, looking so much like an eye closed tight to the world. "The quiet pursuits of women, that men with bad tempers, _and_ little thought for the treatment of their fine clothing, seem so readily to take for granted."

"Like sewing on a button."

"Like sewing on a button," I replied, with a smile. "Yes. That's part of it. It's also something that I shouldn't have to offer, and you shouldn't have to ask."

He frowned. "How so?"

"Loving a person means you already _have_ a reason. It needn't be so...material."

"Is this the same Inara who accepted gifts from a humble physician?" he asked, stepping back so he could place his hands gently on my shoulders. And now I could see a smile, slightly teasing, mixed with curiosity in his gaze. 

"Simon--"

"I know what River told you," he said. "And she's right. You're both right."

I sighed. "It doesn't matter."

"No, Inara, it _does_. I've been waiting for this to fall away. I've been waiting for months, expecting one day to realise how stupid I'd been in thinking that this could last, that it was stupid to even let it happen. I was waiting for Kaylee to stop talking to me. For Mal to keelhaul me out of the airlock for even _looking_ at you. I'm _still_ waiting. And I keep thinking that every time he and I argue, Inara--about food, about bandages, about the horrendously unfair ratio of payment to...to _bullet wounds_ \--I think...I think that's it's all going to come back to you. It'll be about you, and I won't know how to defend myself, because I've no excuses left to give."

"Simon..." I wrapped an arm around his middle and smoothed the rough folds of white shirt beneath his waistcoat. The button was hard in my palm and I held it securely, afraid, in that strange way that love forces fear upon us, that if I dropped it again, it would be lost for good. It was feeling this, the quiet pressure of our bodies as we stood together in my shuttle, and his lips against my cheek, that fuelled the urge to forgive, to understand. "You men," I murmured. "It's almost impossible, just how alike you all are."

~~

The job, in the end, went so smoothly that the heated arguments prior to it now seemed almost inconsequential. I think the only trip to the infirmary was Mal and Jayne after the event, and _that_ for the unsavoury result from several nights' drinking. Though we left with sore heads, it was with the captain's promise that not only would Simon have a newly stocked medicine cabinet, but now we had actual coin to hand, there'd be some proper rest and reprieve for everyone.

In the end I persuaded River into taking Simon's present, saying that if she didn't do _something_ with it, I'd give it to Jayne to clean his knifes with. She duly fashioned it into a pillowslip, and today tells me that her dreams are filled with forest-themed adventures, treasure hunts, and a strange, touching courtship between two beautiful, proud creatures, beneath a wide and delicate bower. It's all rather romantic, but I made her promise not to tell Simon about the last part.

He came to me one night, standing inside the door of my shuttle with a shy look on his face and, in one hand, the waistcoat with its missing button. "I think it's time I figured out how to perform the small frivolities myself," he said. "Don't you?"

We looked at each other. "You'll need a teacher," I replied. "A good one."

"I suppose I will." He stepped forward. "Maybe...you might know of one?"

I thought of the bowerbird, of his need to satisfy, to placate guilt and the strange burden of secrets, and wondered if this wasn't as much a part of my own fear as it was Simon's. Another five months, another summer on an icy planet, who knew where we'd be then. I smiled, broad so that he knew as I meant to show; and I pressed a hand to his unbuttoned shirt and kissed him. Quiet or not, these were the things that we had to believe were worth pursuing. 

"Why, Doctor Tam. There's _always_ a maybe."


End file.
